Therefore Choose by Keith Oatley

father who had been the religious one, but with his father’s death his mother seemed to have taken up the religious part, and she talked about the church she went to. They weren’t demonstrative with each other.

    The lectures and demonstrations about how to take histories, how to listen down a stethoscope, how to elicit a reflex kick by tapping a tendon in the patient’s knee with a patella hammer, were finished. The students each joined a firm. The head of the firm was a consultant, below him a registrar, below him, the houseman, below him, half a dozen students. George’s firm was neurology. The students’ job was to take histories when new patients were admitted, visit the neurology patients as they sat in their beds, make sure charts were up to date, report changes to the houseman, sit in on outpatient clinics, and each lunchtime attend a post-mortem, which was performed by the consultant pathologist. But the students were not on call all night as were the housemen. They did not have to go without sleep. George’s evenings and weekends were still his own.
    Sometimes at the end of a day, George would go for a drink with two or three other students. He stayed close to Peter Bailiss, who seemed to have reconstituted Cambridge in Whitehall. Some evenings George would phone his mother to say he wouldn’t be home until late. He’d sit up into the night with a group of Peter’s colleagues, talking as they had at Trinity.
    He kept in touch, too, with Douglas Hinton, who had started his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, with a junior fellowship and rooms in King’s. One Saturday at the beginning of November, George took the train to Cambridge, and slept on the couch in Douglas’s sitting room.
    â€œYou can come any time,” said Douglas. “I don’t think one’s supposed to have people to stay, but I’m on good terms with the bedder. She won’t say anything.”
    George felt nostalgic for Cambridge. Leytonstone seemed a poor exchange.
    â€œYou went to Germany in the summer,” said Douglas. “How was it?”
    â€œBerlin was fine,” said George. “Too many men in uniform for my taste, but they don’t bother you.”
    â€œAfter Christmas, I’m going to Würzburg for a couple of months. There’s a technique I’ve got to learn there.”

    Most evenings George went back to the house in Leytonstone and ate with his mother before going up to his attic rooms. He thought he and his mother had become like an old married couple for whom everything except mealtimes had fallen away. It would have been better to live closer to town, but this was cheaper and it wasn’t bad. Having him in the house seemed to be enough for his mother, and because — he thought — she felt he was doing the right thing, moving up in the world to become a doctor, she was less critical of him than she had been when he was younger. She seemed, even, to think of him as an adult.
    For George and Anna, it was love at a distance. They wrote each weekend, so that each could look forward to the arrival of a letter during the week.
    In his fourth letter, George wrote that his short story about the old man who had nearly been knocked over, and the dissection room, had been accepted for a magazine.
    In December Anna travelled to London, to stay with George. He was anxious about her coming to stay in his mother’s house.
    â€œWill it be all right if Anna stays here?” he said.
    â€œWhy should it not be?” said his mother.
    George’s mother was not much of a one for jokes, but he saw she was teasing. He was grateful that she seemed not to be taking her religion too far.
    â€œShe can stay in my room, upstairs,” said George.
    â€œThere are no children in the house.”
    When Anna arrived, George’s mother was polite to her, even welcoming.
    George was embarrassed to invite Anna to his attic room with its bed, its two